Linux… Heaven for gamers

Some of you may think Linux is an OS that sucks if you’re into gaming. On the contrary; I think it kicks ass big time. You see, every gamer wants one single thing: to use every single piece of resource their kit has to be allocated to the game they are playing at that moment, so it runs smoothly, at maximum resolution and with the graphic settings pumped up full. Generally, that takes some tweaking, especially if your base-OS is hogging precious resources for stuff you’re not using when gaming. Enter Linux.

Now, I play plenty of (native) games on my regular system user account, like Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, Freeciv, and Wesnoth). I can also play a multitude of Windows-based games through Wine, but many of these (EVE-Online, World of Warcraft, etc) require some hefty system resources if you want to play with all the graphics at full. But I have all these programs and other things using memory and cpu running on my regular system user desktop. So what I do to give the game all the resources I can spare, I simply create a new user account specifically for playing a specific game.

For instance, I create a user named ‘azeroth’, and set things up so when logging in as ‘azeroth’, I’ll get a nice clean LXDE desktop. I’ve installed World of Warcraft in a default .wine directory (using wine, of course) and set a WoW wallpaper as my background image. Now, if I want to play, I have a little more resources for the game to use. Anyone can use a similar (or even better) setup to tweak a specific login to use as little resources as possible. And if you wish to remove the user and the entire (wine) game from your computer?

# userdel -r azeroth

Linux… Gamers should love it!